Question

Pretty much just what the title says; I need to change a column name as part of a migration, can that be done and if so, how?

Answer 1

Laravel 3

Yes it can be done, but only with raw queries. Some DBMS don’t support the changing of column names so it was decided to not implement such functionality since for some DBMS it would fail.

So don’t forget that you can leverage raw queries using DB::raw() within migrations. You can change your column names that way.

Laravel 4

In Laravel 4.1 you must add doctrine/dbal as a dependency in composer.json.

"doctrine/dbal": "2.4.*"

Once you’ve run composer update you can now use the renameColumn method.

Schema::table('users', function($table)
{
    $table->renameColumn('location', 'address');
});

This will rename the location column to address.